This paper approaches coloniality from the eighteenth-century Spanish colonial world, questioning whether colonial structures were ever as stable or totalizing as frameworks of persistence assume. Working with Peruvian earthquake devotions that circulated to Spain and eventually shaped European sacred music, I examine the ways “colonial power” was profoundly unstable. In this case study, colonial subjects developed epistemological frameworks for understanding earthquakes through embodied sound and sensation, which Spanish authorities later extracted and naturalized. This process, however, was scattered, contradictory, and incomplete. The archival record itself performs these instabilities: it reveals colonial subjects creating knowledge while simultaneously obscuring the practices it claims to preserve. If colonial paradigms were themselves contradictory and incomplete in the eighteenth-century, what does their twentieth-century invocation actually mean? This raises questions for how we theorize coloniality. If colonial structures were fragmentary rather than totalizing, what exactly persists into the postcolonial present? Does the framework paradoxically universalize and stabilize what was historically contested? And do different archival formations across fields demand different frameworks rather than unified “coloniality”? Building on Myriam Chancy’s insight that colonial subjects were more than what coloniality made of them, I argue this was true even during the colonial period itself. Centering subjects’ inventive practices may require moving beyond coloniality’s emphasis on structural persistence toward frameworks that can hold both constraint and creativity, extraction and excess.

The globalization of recorded sound at the turn of the twentieth century took place in tandem with a rekindling of imperial ventures across the Global South. As a matter of fact, the transnational outreach of sound recording businesses from North America and Europe was often facilitated by the (neo)colonial interventions of the United States, Britain, Germany, and France in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The opposite was also true. In the wake of the Great War, these nations often capitalized on the mercantile advancement of those and other businesses, in an intricate entanglement of commercial and political imperialism. By focusing on the interventions of sound recording corporations from the Global North in Latin America and the Caribbean during the acoustic era (1877-1925), in this paper I discuss the relevance and limitations of the notion of coloniality to account for the cultural and political factors that informed the dawn of the modern entertainment industry in the region. Expanding upon the ideas of Anibal Quijano and Kyle Levine, I argue that the sound-capturing operations of Victor, Columbia, Odeón, Pathé and other businesses belong to the same matrix of colonial extractivism that informed the interventions of metropolitan corporations in pursuit of natural resources. At the same time, however, the imperial theater of early twenty-century global capitalism reveals multiple layers of agency, action, and materiality in which their colonial contours were inevitably shaped by libidinal economies, consumer culture, and all kinds of battles in the arena of cultural autonomy.

This paper draws on work in critical Black studies to reconsider the utility of coloniality and decoloniality as organizing frames for music scholarship. Latin American scholarship on coloniality has shown how race organizes the modern world, but it has not always specified antiblackness as the ontological force at stake. Critical Black studies, by contrast, insists that antiblackness is not simply one effect of colonial rule but one of its initiating conditions. This paper considers how coloniality functions within Anglophone Caribbean music scholarship as shorthand for naming structures of injury and contradiction. While the term helps mark the afterlives of empire, I argue that it occludes antiblackness, which continually reorganizes distinctions between the proper and the improper and the legitimate and the disposable. Turning to sonic practices of the Anglophone Caribbean, I argue that musical genres dismissed in public discourse as vulgar or fast are not only evidence of colonial residue. They are sites where antiblack classification is actively produced in the present. Following Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, I understand antiblackness as an iterative system whose limits are recalibrated. The policing of musical speed, propriety, national culture, and embarrassment is one such recalibration. At the same time, these musics are apprehended through registers of intensity such as tempo, drive, density, and repetition that exceed the taxonomic distinctions used to contain them. What would it mean to resist easy decolonial optimism while still attending to the potentials of these musics?

Discussion